SHAMBHALA SUN SEPTEMBER 2006 13
SOUL WOMAN
I enjoyed reading Barry Boyce’s
profile of bell hooks in your July
2006 issue. She is awesome—
someone I admire. Since Daugh-
ters of the Dust, hooks has been
growing, and now I see her blos-
som. She’s a soul woman through
and through—and I want some of
what she’s got.
Troy Longmire
Chicago, Illinois
Shambhala Sun, you missed an opportunity to radi-
calize, empower, and revision the practice of Bud-
dhism via discomfort. bell hooks’ work explores the
dance between love and oppression in the American
politico-psychic system. She does this by training one
exquisite critical eye on the culture while turning the
other toward her visceral personal psychology and
laying both bare for readers. In both dimensions of
her work, hooks functions as a teacher in ways paral-
leling the work of many eastern rinpoches and lamas.
I believe Barry Boyce didn’t let down his guard with
Ms. hooks and failed to see her as a teacher. For hooks is
a teacher in both the spiritual and political fashion, just
as was the Buddha and Martin Luther King Jr. I’m afraid
that asking a white man like Mr. Boyce to open to the
dark feminine personified in hooks is too radical for a
journal making its money from ads for retreats and seat
cushions. As a white guy, I need to be made uncomfort-
able in my psychology by seeing my racism, my oppres-
sion, and my sexism in my practice of spirituality. That
discomfort was missing from Mr. Boyce’s profile.
Kevan Jenson
Venice, California
GENTLE MEN
I enjoyed reading Christina Feldman’s “She Who Hears
the Cries of the World” (May 2006) on the bodhisattva
known in Eastern Asia as Kwan-Yin/Guan Yin (Chi-
nese), Gwan-eum (Korean), Kannon (Japanese), and
Quan Âm (Vietnamese). I realize Feldman’s article was
not meant to be an academic one, but
I would have liked to find in it a little
more background information for the
benefit of the novice reader.
While Feldman mentions that this
bodhisattva is usually portrayed as
a female in eastern Asia, she fails to
mention that the popularized Kuan
Shih Yin is a result of feminization of
the male bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara.
Before the spread of Buddhism the
secular male prototypes that ancient
China knew were warriors, scholar-
administrators, and merchants. At
that time in most parts of Eurasia, loving-kindness
and compassion belonged to the female prototype,
the maternal goddess—hence the bodhisattva’s sex
change during China’s Sung dynasty (960-1279).
I respect and honor the
feminization tradition and
understand its importance.
However, it is empowering to
me personally as a male, and
perhaps to other male Bud-
dhists, that we have a male
embodiment of uncondi-
tional, all-encompassing lov-
ing compassion, not only in
the form of an evil-fighting
warrior, but as a gentle spirit
that disarms by means of un-
conditional love. This is a quality that in almost all
Eurasian traditions is portrayed as innately feminine,
which in my opinion has been inhibiting most secu-
lar males’ personal and spiritual growth, and has thus
impeded the salvation of sentient beings as a whole.
Reinhard F. Hahn
Seattle, Washington
THE MEATLESS PATH
I appreciated Noa Jones’s honesty and forthrightness
in tackling the vegetarian question (“The Accidental
Vegetarian,” May 2006), never easy to do in our culture.
However, she erred in her understanding of the dhar-
Letters to the Editor